A number of providers of broadcast content (e.g., Satellite Digital Audio Service (SDARS) provider XM Satellite Radio Inc.) offer subscription services such as a monthly fee for reception of broadcast content that is primarily commercial free. Some users, however, may find the monthly fee amount to be cost prohibitive, but would consider paying for a broadcast service having a higher percentage of commercial content but a lower subscription fee.
A need therefore exists for a broadcast system that can offer different subscription rates that are based on different levels of commercial content being provided to the subscribers with the broadcast content.
A tiered subscription broadcast system is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. U.S. 2006/0190970, to Hellman. In this system, a receiver plays back either received broadcast content in real-time or substituted commercial content. To achieve real-time playback of the received broadcast stream, a real-time broadcast segment is selected to be dropped and commercial content substituted therefor, along with the addition of interstitial content as needed to make up the difference in the durations of the substituted commercial content and the segment dropped from the received broadcast stream to accommodate the substitution of commercial content. This system has the drawback that the real-time broadcast segment which is dropped is typically a song of 3-4 minutes in length, requiring substitution of 3-4 minutes of back-to-back commercials. Since many listeners would be dissatisfied with such long continuous commercial breaks, a need exists to enable the insertion of shorter commercial breaks, which may be as little as 5 seconds in duration.